Abstract
Walter Benjaminʼs radio piece for children, “The Fall of Herculaneum and Pompeii,” part of a mini-series on natural-historical disasters broadcast on Radio Berlin in 1931 and Bertolt Brechtʼs War Primer, a collection of “photo-epigrams” compiled between 1937 and 1944, bookend a period of displacement, personal and political catastrophe and intense reflection on the uses and abuses of mythical thought and the humanist paradigm. Specific to the moment of their production and deploying genres and registers that speak to projects of transformation of enemy practices and “defunct forms,” these writings may also be seen as staging dialectical negotiations of preservation and destruction, set in aftermath sites where ruin and critical recollection hold the line of defence against “dark times” and prepare the ground for radical edification in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s account of that mode in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (first published in 1928): “This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline” (1985, 166). Benjamin links allegory with the “baroque cult of the ruin” in an aphoristic double definition that has gained much traction in studies of his thinking: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (1985, 178). For an application of this Benjaminian formula to a reading of Henry James’s use of the ruin as mental analogue, see Chapter 5 by Chryssa Marinou.
- 2.
For a full account of Hitler’s taste for antiquity, see Chapoutot (2016, 265–284).
- 3.
According to Fredric Jameson, the prototype for this “destructive character” was Karl Kraus. See Jameson (1992, 26).
- 4.
Namely, the poet, novelist and journalist Erich Kästner, author of the popular children’s book Emil und die Detektive (Emile and the Detectives, 1928), the journalist and historian of the German Democratic Party Franz Mehring, and the journalist, poet and essayist Kurt Tucholsky, members of a “left-wing intelligentsia,” which in Benjamin’s account is presented as “the decayed bourgeoisie’s mimicry of the proletariat” (2005c, 424).
- 5.
On the philosophical and political resonances and cultural contestations of the German Bildung, see Kettler and Lauer (2005).
- 6.
- 7.
The broadcast on Pompeii was followed on October 31 of the same year by “The Lisbon Earthquake.” The series continued with “Theater Fire in Canton” (November 5, 1931), “The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay” (February 4, 1932) and “The Mississippi Flood of 1927” (March 23, 1932).
- 8.
See “Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Final Version)” (Benjamin 2002a, 352).
- 9.
See the entry C1a, 2 [“Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris”], in The Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999, 84).
- 10.
See “On the Concept of History”: “His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky” (Benjamin 2006c, 392).
- 11.
See Beard (2012) on this conundrum.
- 12.
On this hypothesis, see Pensky (2011, 77).
- 13.
For a full account of the text’s fortunes, see John Willett’s “Afterword,” in Brecht (2017, 87–94).
- 14.
In “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” Barthes reports that “Round about 1937, Brecht had the idea of founding a Diderot Society, a place for pooling theatrical experiments and studies – doubtless because he saw in Diderot, in addition to the figure of a great materialist philosopher, a man of the theatre” (1977, 78). For a study of Brecht’s theatrical debt to Diderot, see Von Held (2011).
- 15.
- 16.
See for instance Mann’s 1929 novella Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician).
- 17.
The photograph, so evocative of Mother Courage, Brecht’s prescient war play, written in 1939, is a clipping from an unidentified Swedish paper dated 3 December 1940.
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Kolocotroni, V. (2019). Destruction Preservation, or the Edifying Ruin in Benjamin and Brecht. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_14
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